Alice and Scorpio passed an opening where the hall led into a larger chamber, light falling down on them. The SCIF was hidden in the inner workings of the space station, one of many secretly carved out rooms in this subsection. As they continued along the corridor, several guards stood at their posts, pretending to be working on repairs if asked by outsiders.

Alice greeted each of them with a nod, stopping to hand a few metal chips to an especially large one they called the Bull. They exited their hall to find the section with the head and another hall that led to their private chambers.

“Just remember why you’re doing this,” Alice told Scorpio.

“Don’t have to remind me,” he said, eyes finally abandoning that hard look he so often wore, turning to her with compassion. “We’ll get those bastards, and we’ll learn the truth.”

“That’s not what I mean. My conviction is as strong as any, but why? Why is it necessary? What the hell kind of world do we live in where a corporation has this kind of power? It didn’t use to be like this.” (more…)

Fist in the air, Alice spun in her chair with a shallow smile—the smile for her team, but not coming from her heart. She never enjoyed hurting the individuals who’d come up through Project Destiny (PD), but she celebrated it for her team.

The individuals weren’t the ones pulling the strings, but The Looking Glass had to hit them where they could. Soon they’d hit them where it hurt, making a run on PD headquarters.

As if the name weren’t bad enough, with its promise of something greater, something more than what they were. Now the project had opened its doors to new recruits, bringing men and women off the streets in droves to get enhancements and serve as the eyes and ears of the corporations that ran the space stations. They would become part of PD, though not its elite soldiers, not the group she had hit tonight.

“Lured ‘em in like the rats they are,” her teammate Scorpio said. The guy was tall but lean, and had earned his name for a fascination with the constellations and a love of martial arts—that axe kick of his had once broken a PD soldier’s helmet in two. As if he needed more reason for the nickname to stick, the left side of his face had been marked by the enemy when they had captured him once. He now sported the branding of a scorpion with pride, though it meant he was confined to operations HQ, as he’d be made too easily in public. (more…)

None of the red dots on Stealth’s HUD would be alive in a few minutes, so he had no reason to worry. No, it wasn’t worry that crept up on him, sending the taste of bile into the back of his throat and a building tension in his chest.

What then, he wondered as he lifted his rifle and prepared to breach Subsection Alpha of Space Station Horus’s living quarters. This was a known hangout of the lowlifes of this place, and rumored hiding spot of the hacker group that called themselves “The Looking Glass.” His target.

This wasn’t Stealth’s first mission, so the reaction his body was having to it didn’t make sense. A glance at Red showed that the man was ready, breaching charge in place and hand up. He stared back through his faceplate—full, to protect against explosions. It reminded Stealth of a bug, with its built-in air filter in case of gas attacks and the small antennae-like horns on the top and rear, similar to the helmets they’d worn in their Marine Corps days.

Stealth did his best to push the unsettling feeling down, focusing instead on a memory of his training in the Marines before coming here. A drill instructor back on Earth, standing before him in his body armor of green and black, shouting at him to do just one more pushup, then another, then another. “Just one more,” and it went on and on. Repetition, something familiar… order to the chaos. That memory always calmed his nerves, though he was certain it had been the source of an opposite reaction at the time.

Since it was one of his few remaining memories, he clung to it like a dog with its favorite chew toy—which happened to be another snippet of a remaining memory, though one he relied on far less often. (more…)

Valerie glared at the man running along the alley, the Pallicon she had told to meet at the exact spot he was running away from. Dammit, how was she supposed to make any progress when these bastards kept trying to betray her?

“Didn’t I tell him he had one hour to get back to me?” Valerie asked.

“I still say that was generous,” Robin replied. She stood next to Valerie on the rooftop under this wide dome of the moon hybrid space station on the outskirts of the Vurugu planetary system. Her body armor hid her petite but curvy frame, a fact that Valerie was glad about—less distractions always meant for better mission accomplishment.

And at times, the younger woman’s body could certainly be a distraction.

Their mission was paramount. A journey through a foreign galaxy to find a legendary Lost Fleet while also hoping to track down an evil shapeshifter and stop him from raising an army to face off against the Etheric Federation. Hell, if that wasn’t a challenge worth writing home about, Valerie wasn’t sure what was. Except that, lately they had been spending a lot of that time simply flying to reach their destination, which meant a lot of downtime. It had been a time of getting to know her team better—such as the fact that Corporal Flynn enjoyed air drying and didn’t seem bashful in the slightest, or the fact that Sergeant Garcia snored like three bears trying to kill the fourth, with loud snores.(more…)

A blast singed the edge of Samantha’s cloak and she pushed back against the wall, pissed. Even with all the training and fighting she had gone through, the cloak hadn’t actually been damaged.

Until now.

To make it sting that much more, she had been fighting a simple Kolack when she had been hit. Those little bastards seemed to breed like rabbits, inhabiting many of the planets Hadrian sent Samantha to for her skill-point grinding.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if the creatures were capable of such accuracy.

They weren’t the only enemy she had faced lately. Whenever she had the urge to go charging in and blasting something to bits—or cutting through hordes like a hot knife parting butter—she had the ancient magi send her to planets such as this. (more…)

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